Friday, October 31, 2014

To advance her career and to improve her personal life Diana
DeLonzor needed to learn how to be punctual.

DeLonzor was suffering from a problem that apparently
afflicts upwards of 17% of the population. She could never get anywhere on
time. She was chronically late. It was undermining her business relationships and turning her personal life into constant drama.

“It
didn’t matter what time I got up. I could get up at six and still be late for
work at nine,” she recalls. She was reprimanded at work, lost friendships, and
her timely husband was always mad at her. She couldn't stand being late, yet
she just couldn’t change.

“Most
people really hate being late and have tried many times to fix it,” DeLonzor
says. “Punctual people misunderstand. They think you’re doing it as a control
thing, or that you’re selfish or inconsiderate. But, it really is a much more
complex problem than it seems.”

Chronic tardiness is rude. It is insensitive. It is
inconsiderate. Someone who consistently fails to be punctual is
disrespectful.

So, rather than tell people to boast about their superior
capacity for empathy, our culture should be telling them to make a point of showing up on time. If it’s too difficult to be on time, be early.

In some way it’s a tale of two ideas of human happiness.
(See previous post.) In the one personal fulfillment is the meaning of happiness.
In the other respect for others and harmonious social relations are the path to
happiness.

The first fosters tardiness. The second encourages
punctuality.

According to DeLonzor there are different ways to be late
chronically.

Some people like to work to deadline. They enjoy the rush of
doing the all-nighter to get the assignment in. They might not get it in on
time, but they have convinced themselves that they work best under pressure.

Some people are easily distracted. They have it in their
minds that they need to leave the house in order to get to the restaurant on
time, but something comes up… because something always comes up.

Some people thrill to their own productivity. They are so
happy to be getting so much done and so fulfilled getting it done that they
lose track of time.

Other forms of chronic lateness are, MSN says:

... the Rationalizer, who never fully admits to her lateness (many
late people are at least one part Rationalizer); the Indulger, who generally
lacks self-control; the Evader, who tries to control feelings of anxiety and
low self-esteem by being late; and the Rebel, who arrives late to assert power
(Rebels are usually men).

This leaves us with the largest question. How can someone who
is chronically late learn to be punctual?

You might think that he should learn what his symptom means, what
message he is trying to send, what trauma he is repeating in being late. Such
would be the answer offered by psychoanalytically oriented therapy.

The more effective cognitive approach is simpler and more
difficult. The only way to learn to be punctual is to be punctual.

Duh.

MSN lays down some parameters:

Transforming
yourself from chronically late to perfectly punctual is a big task. [Psychologist
Pauline] Wallin says it is important to make deadlines non-negotiable, “like a
promise to yourself.” Start with something easily attainable, like vowing not
to hit snooze tomorrow — not even once. “If you can't commit to a small
inconvenience like that," she cautions, "you are not ready to tackle
your chronic lateness.” Before jumping in, try an experiment: Get somewhere on
time. Just once. Just to see how it feels. Note your reaction. Are you relieved
or anxious? Proud or bored as hell? Then work your way up from there.

As for other tips, try these:

Step 1:
Relearn to tell time. Every day for two weeks, write down each task you have to
do and how long you think it will take. Time yourself as you go through your
list — showering and dressing, eating breakfast, driving to work, picking up
the dry cleaning, doing the dishes — and write the actual time next to your
estimate. Many people have certain time frames cemented in their brains that
aren’t realistic. Just because once, five years ago, you made it to work in 12
minutes flat doesn’t mean it takes 12 minutes to get to work.

Step 2:
Never plan to be on time. Late people always aim to arrive to the minute,
leaving no room for contingency. Say you need to get to work at 9 a.m. You
assume it takes exactly 12 minutes to get to work, so you leave at 8:48. If you
miss one traffic light or have to run back inside to grab an umbrella, it
becomes impossible to make it in on time. Don't chance it. Both DeLonzor and
Morgenstern say you should plan to be everywhere 15 minutes early.

Step 3:
Welcome the wait. If the thought of getting anywhere ahead of time freaks you
out, plan an activity to do in the interim. Bring a magazine, call a friend you
haven’t spoken to in a while, or go over your schedule for the week. Make the
activity specific and compelling, so you’ll be motivated get there early and do
it.

It takes time and effort to change a habit, but changing this one will do wonders for your life and your mental health.

I’ve made the point often enough, but still, why not make it
again. This time with the imprimatur of Scientific
American.

The point is that the standard Western concept of happiness
differs markedly from the standard Asian or Eastern concept.

We in the West associate happiness with personal fulfillment
and especially with the experience of pleasure. In the East, people believe that
social harmony is more important than individual fulfillment and thus we maintain a
different concept of happiness.

One suspects that what passes for the standard Western mode
of happiness-seeking owes much to the therapy culture.

Everyone
wants to be happy. It's a fundamental human right. It's associated with all
sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what
the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our
frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right?

In
Eastern cultures, the emphasis is on attainment of social harmony, where
community and belonging are held in high regard. In Western cultures, the
emphasis is on attainment of happiness, where the individualistic self tends to
be celebrated.

Researchers have also studied the way happiness is defined
in different dictionaries from different nations:

These
values translate to different weights placed on personal happiness. In one
paper, Oishi and his colleagues examined the definition of
happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations, and found that internal inner
feelings of pleasure defined happiness in Western cultures, more so than East
Asian cultures. Instead, East Asians cultures define happiness more in line
with social harmony, and it is associated with good luck and fortune. Indeed,
when researchers measure feelings of positive affect or
pleasure, they go hand in hand with enhanced feelings of happiness by North
America individuals but not by East Asian individuals. Instead, social factors
- such as adapting to social norms or fulfilling relational obligations – were
associated with enhanced feelings of happiness in East Asia.

Aaker and Smith believe, as I do, that we would do well to
take a lesson from the Eastern approach. Perhaps we should not see happiness
solely in individual terms. Perhaps we should act as though we have a greater
awareness of our social being, that is, of other people. Perhaps we should seek
out another form of happiness.

In their words:

But
prioritizing personal happiness leads to a number of problems, like focusing
too much on the self. Perhaps we need a more balanced approach to happiness
in American culture. Personal happiness is beneficial in some contexts, a
limitation in others—good in moderation, but harmful in excess. In some
moments, we may need and benefit from feeling good, but in other moments, we
might be better served anchoring on balanced, meaningful life focused on
others. Happiness, in this light, is not the proverbial goal to chase, but a (happy)
outcome of a life well lived.

I’m not sure that this means that everyone should dispense
with beauty treatments or proper dress.

Yet, we now learn, from an academic journal, that people
will think you are better looking if they think you are a good person.

Good character makes you better looking.

Who knew?

Melissa Dahl reported in New York Magazine on research conducted at a Chinese university.

Researchers showed students a series of pictures of faces
and asked the students to rate their relative attractiveness. Two weeks later
they showed the students the same pictures, only then they described the people
pictured as either decent and honorable or mean and evil.

The result, Dahl writes:

The
students who thought they were looking at the faces of kind, decent women ended
up rating those faces as more attractive than the students who’d been told they
were judging a bunch of jerkfaces.

You might ask yourself whether our culture encourages people
to be kind and decent, respectful to others and generally nice. Or you might
ask whether the culture encourages people to do whatever they need to do to get
ahead, to express their feelings no matter who they offend.

I agree that “nice” is more attractive than “mean,” but how
many people today—beyond your grandparents—still encourage you to be nice?

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Changing your mind is not like changing your shirt. You can’t
just take off your dirty old mind and put on a nice clean new one.

You can’t do it because the mind has its own habitual way of
working. If it accustoms itself to seeing and interpreting the world and experience in a
certain way it will continue doing so, whether you like it or not.

Getting over a bad mental habit is just as daunting a
prospect as getting over any other kind of habit.

The founder of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck listed a number
of what he called cognitive distortions. I would prefer to call them bad mental
habits.

In either case Alexandra Levit brought them to our attention
in a blog post yesterday.

Among the more salient bad habits:

Thinking in black or white terms. When we see the forces of
light arrayed against the forces of darkness we are likely to ignore shades of
gray. If we believe in an inevitable conflict between one side that is all
right and the other side that is all wrong, we are likely to fail to negotiate
a compromise that might be mutually acceptable.

Blame-shifting. You already know this one. It’s the refusal
to take responsibility for our own behavior. Instead, we shift the blame… to
our friends, our family, our irrational impulses, our primal instincts or
global warming.

And then there’s the tendency to be constantly prepared for
the worst. Beck called it “catastrophizing.” It means that whenever we see the
worst happening to someone else, we assume that it will happen to us. One might
say that this is prudent, but clearly it is excessively prudent, to the point of
making it impossible to do very much of anything.

Also, Beck identified the tendency to believe that we can
change other people and that our happiness depends on our ability to do so. This
one infects everyone in the therapy profession, but especially psychoanalysts.
It is also the bane of those who believe that their love can cure whoever they
love.

Then, Beck offered the control fallacy. Those who suffer
from it either feel responsible for everything that happens to anyone who is
attached to them or refuse to accept responsibility for anything that they do
wrong.

Again, this fallacy shows us making decisions based on a
narrative, not on the facts at hand.

We also err when we reason with our gut. Beck identified a
tendency in some people to believe that if they feel it, it must be true. You know
people who insist that they feel strongly about this or that issue and that
their strong feelings are a clear sign that they are right.

Some of us also believe that everything must be fair and
just in the world. When things do not turn out as our idea dictates we feel
cheated. This suggests that people who want the world to correspond to their
ideals have developed a bad mental habit.

People who are depressed tend to see the world in shades of
dark gray. When evaluating a day when many good things and one bad thing happen
they fixate on the bad thing and conclude that the day was a calamity.

Others endure all manner of suffering because they believe
that the more they suffer the greater will be their eventual and inevitable
reward.

Among other bad mental habits are:

Jumping to conclusions. This refers to the tendency to assume
that people are going to act in character or according to our expectations.
Levit suggests that when we believe that other people and the world should be
following a mental script, we are incapable of adapting to reality. We tend to
judge ourselves harshly when things do not work out according to script and
judge others harshly when they do not follow it.

How do you overcome these bad mental habits? Levit takes a
page from Aaron Beck and recommends, first, identifying the bad mental habit,
and second, attempting to refute it with a reality test:

The
first step is simply to identify when you’re engaging in negative thinking and
try to refute the thought in your mind.

For
instance, if you wake up in a bad mood, you might arrive at work feeling
inadequate and incompetent. But once you recognize that feeling inadequate and
incompetent doesn’t mean you are (emotional
reasoning), you can coach yourself with positive thoughts like, “I was the only
one in the group to get promoted last year,” and “my boss trusted me to draft
his report for the general manager.” Your emotions might not change
immediately, but you’ll be much better equipped to get on with your day.

Of course, one needs to do this repeatedly. And one needs to
accompany it with better mental habits, with judicious judgment and a refusal
to see life as a script.

Only the most obtuse observer would have been shocked to
read that the Obama administration considers the Israeli prime minister to be “chickenshit.”

As Jeffrey Goldberg reports in The Atlantic, it’s just one
more in a long list of invectives:

Over
the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as
recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and
“Aspergery.”

Of course, American
Jews have not noticed. Since they happily voted Jeremiah Wright’s protégé into
the White House, they have a vested interest in blinding themselves to the
obvious.

The obvious, as Caroline Glick has been at pains to point
out, is the Obama administration's deep-seated animus against
Israel.

In Glick’s words:

Since
he assumed office nearly six years ago, US President Barack Obama has been
dogged by allegations of managerial incompetence. Obama, his critics allege,
had no managerial experience before he was elected. His lack of such
experience, they claim, is reflected in what they see as his incompetent
handling of the challenges of the presidency.

In
everything from dealing with the Congress, to reining in radical ideologues at
the IRS, to handling the chaos at the Mexican border, to putting together
coordinated strategies for dealing with everything from Ebola to Islamic State
(IS), Obama’s critics claim that he is out of his league. That he is
incompetent.

But if
Israel’s experience with him is any guide, then his critics are the ones who
are out to sea. Because at least in his handling of US relations with the
Jewish state, Obama has exhibited a mastery of the tools of the executive
branch unmatched by most of his predecessors….

At
least as far as Israel is concerned, Obama’s mastery of the federal bureaucracy
is complete. It is not incompetence that guides his policy. It is malicious
intent toward the US’s closest ally in the Middle East.

The Obama administration has not insulted the leaders of
Iran and North Korea, doubtless because it fears Iran and North Korea. It has
never spoken ill of the leader of the Palestinian authority or the head of
Hamas. The president himself always speaks reverentially about Rev. Farrakhan. Obama and his administration have reserved their opprobrium, insults and invective for one
international leader, the prime minister of the Jewish state.

To most sensible observers, it looks like anti-Semitism. The
rise of European anti-Semitism during the Obama years and the
increasing anti-Semitism on American campuses must have some relationship to
the president’s overt disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, calling Netanyahu “chickenshit’ is especially
galling.

The man who has spent his presidency dismantling the
American military should not call anyone chickenshit.

The man who surrendered Iraq and is in the process of
surrendering Afghanistan should not call anyone chickenshit.

The president who cowers in the face of radical Islam should
not call anyone chickenshit.

And the president who brags about how he pressured Netanyahu
not to attack Iran’s nuclear installations should not call anyone chickenshit.

Fair enough, the words came from an unnamed administration official. We wait to see whether the president apologizes openly for the remarks and whether he fires the official who made them.

If he does not, we may assume that they came from him.

For now the administration’s overarching foreign policy goal
in the Middle East has been détente with Iran. Obama wants to achieve relieve
Iran of the burden of international sanctions. The fact that Iran violates
human rights with impunity does not register with him. Obama seems to care more
about ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program can continue unmolested.

As you would expect, the Obama people blame it all on the
Jews:

Much of
the anger felt by Obama administration officials is rooted in the Netanyahu
government’s periodic explosions of anti-American condescension. The Israeli
defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, in particular, has publicly castigated the
Obama administration as naive, or worse, on matters related to U.S. policy in
the Middle East. Last week, senior officials including Kerry (who was labeled
as “obsessive” and “messianic” by Ya’alon) and Susan Rice, the national
security advisor, refused to meet with Ya’alon on his trip to Washington, and
it’s hard to blame them.

This is administration spin. Keep in mind that at their
first meeting in the White House Obama walked out on Netanyahu and left him
alone while he, Obama, sat down to a family dinner—for ninety minutes.

Do you need a clearer sign of contempt?

And then, during the Gaza war, the administration (see
Caroline Glick’s article, linked above) used a bureaucratic maneuver to block
weapons shipments to Israel. And let’s not forget that the FAA stopped all
flights into Tel Aviv.

And, of course, the administration has always insisted that
the one true obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Israeli settlement
policy.

While Obama and Kerry were tormenting themselves over the
Netanyahu government’s housing policy we lost Iraq, war raged in Syria, ISIS
was rising, the Arab Spring was failing and Iran was proceeding to acquire the
bomb.

Jews who voted for Obama should be ashamed. And they should
send a message to the administration by voting against Democrats in Tuesday’s
election.

While many American Jews believe that the Republican Party,
with its evangelical Christian wing, is their true enemy, the only group that
has wholeheartedly supported Israel of late has been the evangelical wing of
the Republican Party.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Had you been following the latest psycho literature you
would have come away with the sense that empathy is the supreme moral sentiment.
Having a capacity for empathy makes you a fine, upstanding moral being. Lacking
it makes you a psychopath, a sociopath or a bigot.

While empathy, per se, does not show up on what is called
the Big Five personality test, it is lurking in the shadows.

The test measures what it calls personality traits, among
them: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.
In the study the researchers wanted to see the correlation between one or
another of these traits and career success.

The
research examined the careers and personalities of more than 4,500 married
people, using a common personality test known as the Big Five. The
test measures people on five different traits: extraversion (how
outgoing and sociable a person is), agreeableness (how honest and
sympathetic someone is, versus suspicious and unfriendly), conscientiousness
(how well someone can plan and be productive, rather than be disorganized
and impulsive), neuroticism (how anxiety-prone someone is) and openness (how
naturally curious and open to change a person is).

Before going any further, let’s note that extraversion (and
its cousin, introversion), agreeableness (and its component quality of empathy),
neuroticism (a nervous and febrile life style) and openness are personality
traits.

Conscientiousness, however, is a character trait. The
ability to make a plan and to implement it is not a personality trait. Surely, other
parts of conscientiousness involve being responsible and reliable.

So far, so good.

When the researchers examined which personality and
character traits translated into greater career success they discovered that:

… those
with higher levels of extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness
were more likely to have higher levels of future job satisfaction.
Meanwhile, higher conscientiousness was also tied to better salaries, and
greater extraversion was linked with more promotions on the job.

Nothing about this should come as a surprise. People who are
more outgoing and more sociable, who get along well with others and who
practice those qualities conscientiously, with good manners, are more likely to
do well on the job.

Interestingly, people who are more conscientious are more
likely to make more money while the extraverts are more likely to get more
promotions.

McGregor continues:

On the
negative side, individuals who were particularly agreeable often had lower
income and fewer job promotions. And unsurprisingly, those who scored high on
the neuroticism traits were also less satisfied with their jobs.

No one is surprised that people who are nervous and
suspicious and untrusting are not going to do very well in their careers. And
yet, it is somewhat surprising that people who value agreeableness above all
else, who share feelings freely and openly are less successful at work.

But, this is not the more interesting part of the study.

That lies in the fact that those who succeed in the business
world are more often married to spouses who exhibit one “personality” trait in
particular: conscientiousness.

If a man’s wife is conscientious, he will do better on the
job. It is, the research suggests, the only wifely trait that really matters
for his career success.

If his wife is not conscientious, she might be empathic and
agreeable, to say nothing of extraverted and open and even sexy, but her husband will not do
as well.

Admittedly, the Washington Post story uses the gender
neutral term of spouse. It does make some sense. In a world that is awash in
househusbands and female breadwinners, it seems quaint to talk about husbands
and wives.

And yet, to avoid confusion, I will use the more traditional
terms.

The conclusion, again: a conscientious wife will be an
integral part of her husband’s career success. (Until, that is, she faces a
judge in divorce court and is told that she should not expect very much
alimony. See previous post.)

Why should this be so?

The researchers speculate:

Yet
when it came to the effect of a spouse's personality traits on a person's career, only
high scores on conscientiousness had any impact, whether positive or negative.
Jackson suggests two main reasons for this: One, he says, is that people
often emulate their spouses' behavior, meaning a husband's or wife's
industriousness and organizational skills might rub off on the other.

The
second reason is that when a person's spouse is organized, efficient and
hard working, they're probably tackling the bulk of the
household chores, freeing their husband or wife up to focus more
on his or her job. "You're not as stressed about certain chores or
duties that need to be done while you're at work," Jackson says.

The second reason feels far more cogent than the first. As
for the question of what does or does not rub off on one’s spouse, it is equally
possible that a conscientious individual would choose a conscientious spouse.

Surely, it follows that if a woman has exalted career
ambitions, like Sheryl Sandberg, she would do well either to have a
conscientious househusband or an extensive household staff.

Unfortunately, McGregor wants to promote chore-sharing, so
she misses the second of Jackson’s points. She follows Sandberg blindly when
she says that both members of a couple should be sharing household chores
equally.

In truth, Jackson’s second point suggested a traditional
division of household labor. It is fair to note that if career success depends
on being freed of any worry about the home front, the need to share household
chores bespeaks one’s spouse’s lack of conscientiousness.

Believing that one’s spouse can be counted on to do only half
the chores does not free the working spouse from being distracted by what might
or might not be going on at home.

Increasingly,
this is what what’s happening in divorce courts across the country. Nearly
every state is revisiting its laws on alimony — or “maintenance” — in divorce
cases, and the trend is universal: more limits on length of support, and
standardization on sums doled out. And in many cases, maintenance is denied all
together, even for women who have not worked for decades.

Yes, doled. More and more, that is how
courts see it, according to my friend Morghan Richardson, a New York City family
attorney.

“Judges
increasingly look with suspicion at post-judgment alimony requests,” Richardson
says. “They see that women have just as much opportunity to earn as men do, and
they should — even stay-at-home-moms who haven’t worked for decades.”

I have been hearing similar stories for years now. How
prevalent they are is subject to debate, but certainly it happens.

Why the change in attitude?

It’s because feminism has won. It’s because women have more
opportunity than ever before to be self-supporting and self-sufficient. These
superior creatures do not need to depend on any man.

Right?

At first glance, the new attitude looks like a backlash
against feminism, engineered by oppressive patriarchal judges.

In truth, it’s just the opposite. Often, it’s feminist
judges who deprive women of alimony.

Why should that be?

These judges are contemptuous
of any woman who did not do what feminism told her to do, but who chose to depend on her
husband for financial support.

Johnson quotes the view of her friend and divorce lawyer,
Richardson:

“I’ve
been in court where a judge would outright admonish my clients for not working
or looking for work, telling them that ‘care-taking for a child does not
absolve you from supporting yourself.’ This is a harsh reality check for some
stay-at-home moms, who sometimes have a real sense of entitlement about the
decision to stay home. On one hand, that was a marital decision, but on the
other hand, the marriage is over,” Richardson says. “There is little sympathy
for women who quit their jobs to stay home from the courts, particularly when
the magistrate is a woman who has worked her way up as a lawyer — most likely
having to put her own children in daycare to earn a seat on the bench.”

Richardson
recently had a client who was stunned to learn she was expected to return to
work after having been home with her now-teenage sons for 15 years. The woman —
now in her late 40s — eventually took a job stocking shelves at her cousin’s
store to make ends meet, even though her husband earned more than $200,000 per
year.

Let’s see. Women are free to choose. They are free to choose
the way they want to live their lives.

Except that they are not.

Apparently, the feminist party line has it that a woman who
does not conduct her life the way feminism wants her to conduct it, who takes
on the role of housewife, should, if the opportunity arises, be
punished.

Feminist judges look down on housewives with contempt and
punish them for not doing what feminism told them to do.

Since feminists believe that a marriage based on traditional
roles is destined to fail they feel a special kind of Schadenfreude when it
happens. If they are judges and hold the power over these women’s lives they
take the opportunity to teach them a lesson.

If this is true—and I hope that it is very, very rare—it
means that some feminists consider that the work entailed in making a home and
raising children is worth, precisely, nothing.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

In today’s America the only acceptable bigotry is political.
Far more than in the past people judge others by political affiliation. They
have no problem excluding someone from their social circle or even refusing him
or her a job for holding the wrong political views.

Cass Sunstein labelled the problem partyism. He defined its
prevalence in a Bloomberg column:

If you
are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister
did?

Researchers
have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important
dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice
in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about
dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, "partyism" now exceeds
racial prejudice -- which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election
campaigns.

In
1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would
feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political
party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49
percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than
they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans
more than they dislike big business.

The
broad social phenomenon is that as personal life is being de-moralized,
political life is being hyper-moralized. People are less judgmental about
different lifestyles, but they are more judgmental about policy labels.

The
features of the hyper-moralized mind-set are all around. More people are
building their communal and social identities around political labels. Your
political label becomes the prerequisite for membership in your social set.

Politics
becomes a marker for basic decency. Those who are not members of the right
party are deemed to lack basic compassion, or basic loyalty to country.

Finally,
political issues are no longer just about themselves; they are symbols of worth
and dignity. When many rural people defend gun rights, they’re defending the
dignity and respect of rural values against urban snobbery.

Brooks’ point is important and, in my view, correct.

When people do not practice good behavior; when they believe
that they are called upon to excuse all forms of bad behavior; when they do not
believe that they have the right to judge anyone’s character… they end up
judging people by their beliefs.

Brooks is arguing, as I would, that good character-- the
ability to follow the basic principles of decorum, propriety, humility,
modesty, respect and responsibility – produces social harmony.

But this requires that everyone follow the same rules. In a multicultural
world there are no rules that apply to everyone, so we can only form groups by
finding others who hold to the same beliefs.

People think of this as enlightened, but it resembles religious
fanaticism. If a religion insists that everyone hold to the same beliefs it
will quickly figure out that it is impossible to know precisely what anyone
really believes.

Thus, it will feel the need to test believers to see if they
are harboring heretical beliefs. It will run inquisitions and witch hunts to
rid the populace of people who might be unbelievers.

And it fears any association with individuals who might be
heretics or who might not be sufficiently fervent in their convictions.

How did our nation arrive at this impasse? How did it arrive
at the point where we no longer consider that honorable people can hold
different opinions, but insist that any difference of opinion is a sign of moral depravity?

Surely, the failure to practice the classical virtue of
patriotism must play a part. If we are all Americans, all wanting what is best
for the nation, all feeling pride in the nation… then our differences of opinion
are about the means, not the goal.

As Brooks explains it:

Most of
the time, politics is a battle between competing interests or an attempt to
balance partial truths. But in this fervent state, it turns into a Manichaean
struggle of light and darkness. To compromise is to betray your very identity.
When schools, community groups and workplaces get defined by political
membership, when speakers get disinvited from campus because they are beyond
the pale, then every community gets dumber because they can’t reap the benefits
of diverging viewpoints and competing thought.

Keep in mind, many serious thinkers believe in the positive
value of the “Manichean struggle of light and darkness.” Only, they call it a
dialectical conflict between opposites.

If we do not believe that we have a monopoly on the truth,
we will be willing to interact with those who offer different ideas. After all,
we might be able to craft a negotiated compromise that satisfies both parties.

Why is this no longer possible? One reason must be an
educational system that insists on emphasizing America’s fault, failings, crimes
and derelictions.

If you teach children to criticize their country, you will
be demoralizing them and making it impossible for them to identify first as
Americans and second as Republicans or Democrats.

Brooks also believes that the
nation is suffering from a lack of serious discussion of morality by public
intellectuals. This is also true. There is no real discussion of the importance of classical
ethical virtues and the need to develop good character.

The therapy culture would never
allow it.

What passes for moral
discussion in America today involves defaming and slandering people who do not
hold correct beliefs. Citizens are routinely denounced for being racist,
sexist, homophobic and whatever.

In such a context your moral
being derives from your beliefs… and from any behavior that would betray a bigoted
belief. Those who launch these accusations feel comfortable in their
self-righteous moral superiority. The accused are immediately labeled as unfit
for human community.

The
extent of Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza's growing rage, isolation and
delusions when he was a teenager were apparently overlooked by his mother,
psychiatrists and counselors, according to a report expected to be issued next
month.

The
report found that Lanza, who gunned down 20 children and six educators at the
Sandy Hook Elementary School nearly two years ago, did not have to become a
violent adult, Scott Jackson, chairman of the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission,
said on Friday.

It says
better screening and evaluation might have helped detect earlier the
20-year-old's potential for violence. Lanza also killed his mother and then
himself in the Dec. 14, 2012 violence.

Of course, when faced with a horror like what Lanza did at
Sandy Hook, it is normal to ask what went wrong. And yet, Lanza’s problems were
not ignored by his mother or his father. Unfortunately for them and for the
people of Sandy Hook, they were doing what the psychiatrists told them.

The failure ought not to be laid at the foot of the parents,
but of the psychiatrists who had examined and evaluated Lanza.

For those who prefer not to wait for the Connecticut report
Andrew Solomon wrote his own extensive analysis of the situation for The New
Yorker several months ago. See also, my previous post.

Solomon discovered that Lanza’s parents had taken him to see
many psychiatrists. Surely, we cannot fault the parents for trusting the
opinions of major psychiatrists in New York and New Haven. It may not seem possible that they were all wrong, but clearly
they were.

They were wrong when they placed Adam on the autism spectrum,
diagnosing Asperger’s syndrome.

Solomon reports:

When
Adam was thirteen, Peter and Nancy took him to Paul J. Fox, a psychiatrist, who
gave a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome (a category that the American
Psychiatric Association has since subsumed into the broader diagnosis of autism
spectrum disorder). Peter and Nancy finally knew what they were up against. “It
was communicated as ‘Adam, this is good news. This is why you feel this way,
and now we can do something about it,’ ” Peter recalled.

A year later, they took Adam to see another psychiatrist:

When
Adam was fourteen, shortly after Ryan had left for college, Peter and Nancy
took him to Yale’s Child Study Center for further diagnosis. The psychiatrist
who assessed Adam, Robert King, recorded that he was a “pale, gaunt, awkward
young adolescent standing rigidly with downcast gaze and declining to shake
hands.” He also noted that Adam “had relatively little spontaneous speech but
responded in a flat tone with little inflection and almost mechanical prosody.”
Many people with autism speak in a flat tone, and avoiding eye contact is
common, too, because trying to interpret sounds and faces at the same time is
overwhelming. Open-ended questions can also be intolerable to people with
autism, and, when King asked Adam to make three wishes, he wished “that
whatever was granting the wishes would
not exist.”

Dr. King added a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder:

King
noted evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often accompanies
autism. Adam refused to touch metal objects such as doorknobs and didn’t like
his mother to touch them, either, because he feared contamination. “Adam
imposes many strictures, which are increasingly onerous for mother,” King
wrote. “He disapproves if mother leans on anything in the house because it is
‘improper.’ . . . He is also intolerant if mother brushes by his
chair and objected to her new high heel boots, because they were ‘too
loud.’ . . . If mother walks in front of him in the kitchen, he
would insist she redo it.” King was concerned that Adam’s parents seemed to
worry primarily about his schooling, and said that it was more urgent to
address “how to accommodate Adam’s severe social disabilities in a way that
would permit him to be around peers.” King saw “significant risk to Adam in
creating, even with the best of intentions, a prosthetic environment which
spares him having to encounter other students or to work to overcome his social
difficulties.” And he concluded that Nancy was “almost becoming a prisoner in
her own house.”

Lanza was also being treated at Yale by nurse Kathleen
Koenig. His psychiatrist had put him on Lexapro, an anti-depressant, but he
reacted badly to it.

Solomon writes:

Adam
stopped taking Lexapro and never took psychotropics again, which worried
Koenig. She wrote, “While Adam likes to believe that he’s completely logical,
in fact, he’s not at all, and I’ve called him on it.” She said he had a
biological disorder and needed medication. “I told him he’s living in a box
right now, and the box will only get smaller over time if he doesn’t get some
treatment.”

Perhaps this tells us that depression was not the problem. It also makes us ask
why no one had noticed the signs of psychosis or had tried an anti-psychotic
medication.

As for Adam’s refusal to take any other medication, this is
yet another reason to loosen the laws about involuntary commitment.

In any event, the Lanza parents accepted the Asperger’s
diagnosis. To their and the community’s regret. Later, Adam’s father, Peter
Lanza had a better sense of the problem:

Peter
gets annoyed when people speculate that Asperger’s was the cause of Adam’s
rampage. “Asperger’s makes people unusual, but it doesn’t make people like
this,” he said, and expressed the view that the condition “veiled a contaminant”
that was not Asperger’s: “I was thinking it could mask schizophrenia.” Violence
by autistic people is more commonly reactive than planned—triggered, for
example, by an invasion of personal space. Studies of people with autism who
have committed crimes suggest that at least half also suffer from an additional
condition—from psychosis, in about twenty-five per cent of cases. Some
researchers believe that a marked increase in the intensity of an autistic
person’s preoccupations can be a warning sign, especially if those
preoccupations have a sinister aspect. Forensic records of Adam’s online
activity show that, in his late teens, he developed a preoccupation with mass
murder. But there was never a warning sign; his obsession was discussed only pseudonymously
with others online.

True enough, no one can predict what now appears to have
been a psychosis will manifest itself. Certainly, it need not produce mass
murder.

And yet, the question remains: why?

Solomon asked it:

But,
important as those issues are, our impulse to grasp for reasons comes,
arguably, from a more basic need—to make sense of what seems senseless. When
the Connecticut state’s attorney issued a report, in December, CNN announced,
“Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza took motive to his grave.” ATimes headline ran “CHILLING
LOOK AT NEWTOWN KILLER, BUT NO ‘WHY.’ ” Yet no “motive” can
mitigate the horror of a bloodbath involving children. Had we found out—which
we did not—that Adam had schizophrenia, or had been a pedophile or a victim of
childhood abuse, we still wouldn’t know why he
acted as he did.

In the most obvious sense, knowing why Adam Lanza did what
he did is far less important than stopping him from doing it. That would have
entailed a correct diagnosis and treatment, probably in an inpatient facility.
Knowing how troubled he was is not the same as knowing why did what he did.

If we still want to know why he did it, we might also
consider the possibility that the intense media attention to mass murderers like
the Aurora shooter James Holmes and Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold showed Adam Lanza a way to become infamous.

Monday, October 27, 2014

As much as I admire Sartre-- a great, but now often
overlooked philosopher-- his statement leaves much to be desired.

True enough, some people are hell to deal with, but if Sartre believed that all
other people were hellish then he should have chosen his friends better.

Carrie Bradshaw and her friends were trying to deal with what
she called New York’s toxic bachelors. Now, consultant Travis Bradberry
explains that success in life depends largely on your ability to deal with
toxic individuals.

We are all happy to learn that it’s not just New York
bachelors who are toxic.

According to Bradberry, if you spend your time interacting
with toxic people your stress levels will rise and your health, both mental and
physical, will be compromised.

One should note that therapists are in the
business of dealing with toxic individuals. Surely, a therapist’s ability to
manage toxic emotion, rather than to try to find out how meaningful it is, will
not only help his patients but will protect his own sanity.

Bradberry reports on some recent research:

Recent
research from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich
Schiller University in Germany found that exposure to stimuli that cause strong
negative emotions—the same kind of exposure you get when dealing with toxic
people—caused subjects’ brains to have a massive stress response. Whether it’s
negativity, cruelty, the victim syndrome, or just plain craziness, toxic people
drive your brain into a stressed-out state that should be avoided at all costs.

In the same vein, the Washington Post explained that toxic
bosses are likely to make you sick:

Difficult
bosses can come in many forms, including hypercritical micromanagers, inept
managers, bosses who push blame for problems onto others or hurl obscenities,
and those who make unwanted sexual advances. But researchers say that whatever
the type, when employees deal with a bad boss day in and day out, negative
health effects often begin to pop up.

But, how do you go about managing your relationships with
toxic individuals?

While examining some of Bradberry’s recommendations—all of
which are useful—ask yourself whether, by these criteria, therapists manage
toxic people well or poorly. If therapists cannot manage their patients’ toxic
emotions, how will they be able to teach their patients how to deal with toxic
people themselves?

It is worth underscoring that these methods for dealing
with toxic individuals come to us from the world of business consulting, not
therapy.

Bradberry’s first guideline for dealing with toxic
individuals is this: set limits to how much complaining you are willing to
listen to. He adds that, instead of allowing another individual to expound on
problems and issues, it is better to direct the conversation toward solutions.

He writes:

Complainers
and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail
to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they
can feel better about themselves. People often feel pressure to listen to
complainers because they don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s
a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their
negative emotional spiral….

A great
way to set limits is to ask complainers how they intend to fix the problem.
They will either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive
direction.

Working on issues means working out the possible solutions.
It does not involve wondering what it all means, pondering why you cannot
solve the problem or asking which unresolved childhood is being played out.

In Bradberry’s words:

Where
you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on
the problems you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions and
stress. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances,
you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and
reduces stress.

It is reasonable to ask whether therapists are prone to allow
their patients to wallow in their issues or whether they look for practical
ways to solve problems. It is also reasonable to ask whether patients, faced
with a therapist who wants to hear complaints, believe that more, better
complaining constitutes progress.

Toxic people, he
believes, are emotionally overwrought. You are not going to be able to
deal with such an individual if you decide to match emotion with emotion.

So much for empathy.

To manage the situation, take a deep breath, step back,
control your emotions and try to reason with the individual. That means,
Bradberry notes, trying to bring things back to the level of objective facts.
With that I obviously concur.

If it all becomes too arduous, you need to step away from
the conversation and the individual.

You certainly need to control the space and time of
interactions with toxic individuals.

In Bradberry’s terms, you need to set boundaries. Most
therapists are very good at this, if only because they schedule sessions. And
they do so in a way that applies, in principle to everyone and thus allows
everyone to feel that they are submitting to the same set of rules.

If you are outside of a situation where you can set clear
limits, you will need to make sure that you do not get involved in difficult
conversations until you are ready to do so. Having someone make an appointment
to discuss a matter with you will immediately set a boundary.

Finally—for our purposes— you should not see toxic individuals as
crazy people, as suffering from an emotional disturbance. Thus, you should not try
to address their craziness. Instead, try to figure out how you are going to
handle them.

In Bradberry’s words:

When it
comes to toxic people, fixating on how crazy and difficult they are gives them
power over you. Quit thinking about how troubling your difficult person is, and
focus instead on how you’re going to go about handling them. This makes you
more effective by putting you in control, and it will reduce the amount of
stress you experience when interacting with them.

Unfortunately, the therapy profession tends, for obvious reasons,
to see toxic people in psychiatric terms. It sees them as cases, suffering from
emotional disturbances, needing medical treatment.

Many psychiatrists have their own way of dealing with toxic individuals. They
do not bother to listen to complaints, but whip out their prescription
pads and tell their patients to come back in a month.

Of course, this is an extreme way to manage toxic people. It is surely not the same as coddling them, but it goes to the other extreme: it dismisses them. Unfortunately, this technique will not work outside of a psychiatrist’s office. If you try it at home or on the job you might end up telling your toxic friends to ingest the wrong kinds of substances.